Toilet Explodes: Woman Warns To Check Yours

A woman in Heron Lake, Minnesota, is asking everyone to check their toilets. She's offering a warning after a high-pressure water tank inside actually exploded seconds after she walked out of the bathroom.

Other toilets with the same model number could be prone to blow up too.

You might accuse Lisa Carlson of resorting to "potty humor" in Heron Lake this week.

"Well they think it's funny I guess," she says.

But the source of the jokes could have been the source of serious injury if Carlson's hands weren't full when she tried to "catch" her running toilet.

"I intended to go back in," she says. "I was going to set that stuff down, go back in, lift off that lid and hook the chain back up or whatever I could do to fix it."

But that lid became a porcelain projectile when the water pressure tank inside exploded.

It's a known product defect in toilets using Sloan Flushmate high-pressure flushers made in 1997 and '98. The pressure tank can split at the seams.

On Flushmate's website, you can check the serial number to see if your toilet is included and get a new one as part of a recall. But Carlson didn't think to check the toilet when she moved her hair styling business into a different building two years ago.

"I didn't even know I had a high-pressure toilet until that day," Carlson says. "That's why I couldn't understand why it blew up."

Now that she does understand, she wants others to be careful.

And she's not joking.

"I think they're dangerous. I really do," she says.

Carlson's pressure tank falls under the product recall and the company has offered to pay for an entirely new toilet.

Visit Flushmate's product recall page here to see if your toilet is affected.